Cancer can be combated with reprogrammed macrophage cells

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have generated antibodies that reprogramme a type of macrophage cell in the tumour, making the immune system better able to recognise and kill tumour cells. The study, which is published in the journal Cell Reports, could lead to a new therapy and provide a potentially important diagnostic tool for breast cancer and malignant melanoma.

Immunotherapy, in which the immune system is enhanced in order to kill tumour cells, especially the kind designed to activate the immune system, is changing the way we treat cancer. Unlike other forms of cancer therapy, immunotherapy targets not the tumour itself but specific cells in the immune system to unleash the ability of the immune system to kill the tumour.

"We've found a new way of using antibodies for immunotherapy that activates immune cells, called macrophages, in the tumour," says research team member Mikael Karlsson at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology. "This makes it easier for the immune system to recognise the tumour and animal studies of three different cancers have given promising results."

In 2013, the leading scientific journal Science called cancer immunotherapy the year's most groundbreaking advancement. Antibodies that increase the ability of T-cells to kill tumour cells have proved particularly effective and created new opportunities for treating previously untreatable cancer.

Not sufficiently effective

However, for some patients, T-cell modified immunotherapy has not been sufficiently effective, as some tumours still manage to conceal themselves from the immune system by emitting signals that prevent the immune cells from recognising them. Another reason for the occasional failure of the therapy is that tumours do not trigger as strong an immune reaction as, for example, infections do.

For the present study, the researchers focused on macrophages, immune cells whose normal function is to combat infection. Some macrophages, however, affect their environment in the tumour in a way that makes it easier for cancer cells to survive and spread. Commonly dominant in tumours is a type of macrophage that prevents T-cells and other immune cells from recognising and killing cancer cells.

Stopped the tumours

The researchers managed to reprogramme and activate these macrophages by using an antibody targeted at a protein on their cell surface, which stopped the tumours from growing and spreading in mice. The antibody therapy also
boosted a type of T-cell-modifying immunotherapy in clinical use. The researchers also show that this type of macrophage can be found in human breast cancer and malignant melanoma, and therefore hope to be able to develop an antibody that can one day be used for treating these patients.

"We now hope that this new therapy, which has so far been tested preclinically, will one day be used in combination with another immunotherapy to make it even more efficacious," says Professor Karlsson. "We are also looking into whether the presence of this type of macrophage in human tumours can be used clinically for the diagnosis of cancer diseases."

Related Stories

High-grade glioma is the most aggressive form of brain cancer. Despite improvements in surgical procedures, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy, this type of brain tumour is still notoriously hard to treat: less than 10% of patients ...

Radiation therapy not only kills cancer cells, but also helps to activate the immune system against their future proliferation. However, this immune response is often not strong enough to be able to cure tumours, and even ...

Researchers in the group of Prof. Dr. Peter Vandenabeele (VIB/UGent) show that killed tumour cells can serve as a potent vaccine that stimulates the immune system to prevent the outgrowth of cancer cells. This finding opens ...

The conventional wisdom about cancer cells is that they are masters of camouflage, invisible to the immune system. However, occasionally, the immune system is alerted to the presence of a cancer cell and springs into action ...

A study by researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet is the first to suggest that cells in the tumour blood vessels contribute to a local environment that protects the cancer cells from tumour-killing immune cells. The ...

Recommended for you

Drugs that target BRAF and MEK in cancer have shown promise in treating a subset of melanoma that carries a mutation in the BRAF gene, but drug resistance usually emerges, reversing the benefit of these drugs and limiting ...

Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have made a discovery about human papillomavirus (HPV) that could lead to new treatments for cervical cancer and other cancers caused by the virus.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center discovered a combination of a cancer vaccine with two checkpoint drugs reduced pancreatic cancer tumors in mice, demonstrating a possible pathway for treatment of people ...

Recent breakthroughs in immunotherapy are making a huge difference in treating some forms of cancer, especially metastatic cancer. But breast cancer has proven a tricky foe for this new therapy, and an interdisciplinary team ...

Due to their powerful tumour-killing effect, metal-based chemotherapies are frequently used in cancer treatment. However, it was hitherto assumed that they damaged the immune system, because of their cytotoxic (cell-damaging) ...

Ten years after a negative colonoscopy, Kaiser Permanente members had 46 percent lower risk of being diagnosed with and were 88 percent less likely to die from colorectal cancer compared with those who did not undergo colorectal ...

0 comments

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.